Tag: Lee Murray

“Handbag Heist” might be the sissiest sounding crime in the history of crimes committed by MMA fighters, but it doesn’t change the fact that UFC lightweight Reza Madadi is headed to a year and a half in Swedish prison for it nonetheless.

The Swedish tabloid Expressen is reporting that UFC lightweight Reza “Mad Dog” Madadi was arrested Friday on a charge of grand theft in his home country. Bloody Elbow summarized and translated the article for details of the alleged heist:

“One of Sweden’s most successful star athletes, in his sport, is suspected for a smash-and-grab burglary on Stureplan in Stockholm. The loot was luxury handbags worth a million kronor (SEK) [approximately $150,000]. The sports star, who denies [the] charges, was arrested after a dramatic car chase.

Madadi was not specifically named in the tabloid article, which referenced prior legal troubles of the Iranian-Swedish fighter — including a 2009 arrest for an alleged cash depot robbery* — but court documents later confirmed that Madadi was indeed arrested last Friday. Madadi is said to have a public defender representing him and is fighting the charges and maintaining that he is innocent. If he is convicted, BE reports that he could face up to six years in prison.

Madadi’s last fight was a submission win over Michael Johnson at UFC on Fuel 9 in Sweden. The lightweight was scheduled to face TUF 15 winner Michael Chiesa next in Seattle this coming July until he encountered visa problems and was removed from the card.

After the jump: lots more details from the handbag heist, via the Expressen article.

It might take Real Crime’s documentary on the biggest cash heist in British history some thirty minutes to get to former UFC fighter Lee Murray, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. Detailing the intricate, if not mismanaged, raid of the Medway cash depot in Kent, South East England on February 22nd, 2006, Real Crime provides an enthralling look back at the whos, wheres, and hows of the meticulously planned heist unlike any other documentary in recent memory.

Managing to get interviews with everyone from Colin Dixon, the manager of the depot who was held hostage along with his family and coworkers, to Dave O’Donnell, an English fight promoter who simply cannot speak highly enough of Murray despite the evidence at hand, this documentary labels Murray “the mastermind” behind the entire escapade, which resulted in the theft of over 53 million pounds (84 million dollars). Murray and his gang utilized prosthetic masks, fake police uniforms, hidden cameras, and an arsenal of weapons that would make the cast of Predatorblush to pull off their crime, only to be caught within the four months that followed it. Murray was sentenced to 10 years in Moroccan prison for his role in the heist, where he managed to pull off an even greater one: fathering a child and skipping out on the alimony payments LIKE A BOSS.

Unfortunately, the documentary fails to provide any insight regarding “Lightning’s” back alley brawl with Tito Ortiz, which is what we all really want to know about. But check out the video above, which features several highlights from Murray’s fight with Anderson Silva, and learn yourself something new. Who knows, maybe you can use this information to one day pull off an even greater robbery and actually get away with it. May the force be with you.

After the jump: A full video of Murray vs. Silva, because we’ve got to make this MMA-related somehow.

A few weeks ago, we ran down the crappiest fighters to ever be crowned “champion.” In this week’s installment of the CagePotato Roundtable, we’re sort of doing the opposite of that — discussing fighters who had all the talent in the world (and actually were champions in some cases), but screwed themselves out of glory thanks to their own poor decisions. So who was the biggest waste of potential in MMA history? Who made chicken shit out of chicken salad? Read on and we’ll tell you. As usual, if you have a topic suggestion for the Roundtable, please send it to tips@cagepotato.com.

“Personal Demons.” It’s arguably the most annoying phrase in sports journalism. The phrase is nothing more than a cop-out; what we use to show that an athlete’s performance has been sub-par due to his life outside the sport, while concurrently admitting that we have no business going there. Rather than just say that someone’s career is in a rut due to a crippling addiction or reckless antisocial behavior, we say that they have “personal demons.” Because it’s trashy to say it, but it’s somehow professional to imply it.

Yet “personal demons” is the perfect phrase to describe our sport’s biggest waste of potential — and the only WEC Middleweight Champion to defend the belt — Paulo Filho.

The cage-fighting crime boss behind the £53m Securitas heist has been moved to a high-security unit and stripped of prison luxuries. It comes after the Sunday Mirror revealed that Lee Murray, who is behind bars in Morocco on drug charges, fathered a child behind bars. Prison chiefs were furious after learning that he flouted rules by sleeping with a woman visitor who was not his wife.

Murray, 32, was moved to a tougher unit of Kenitra prison, near Rabat, and his mobile phone, television and DVDs were confiscated. It is believed that his right to have visitors has also been withdrawn…

(“I’ll have that technicality served with a nice chianti and some fava beans.”)

According to a report from London’s UK Mirror, Lee Murray and his co-accused in the 2006 Securitas depot heist could be headed back to court for a retrial and there’s a good chance that they could win this time around.

The reason for the latest development is that a forensics investigator in the case who allegedly collected DNA belonging to the accused from latex masks made for them by a local studio to wear as disguises in the robbery, has been found guilty of disposing of key evidence in another case. If the defendants’ lawyers can argue that there’s a reasonable doubt as to whether or not she could have done the same while collecting evidence for their cases, the charges against them could be dropped.

By law, the Kent Police were required to inform the lawyers of the gang jailed for the record-breaking estimated $85 million (USD) heist about their officer’s mistake and guilty finding.

The rule applies in any profession: For every law-abiding nice-guy, there’s an unstable son-of-a-bitch who you’d never want to leave your kids alone with. And so, we decided to take a ride through MMA’s shadowy history of assault, robbery, vandalism, drug-smuggling, and other nasty behavior — the most infamous examples of fighters living dangerously and paying the price…

It’s never a good idea to have evidence of your law-breaking published nationally. In a bizarre lapse of judgment, heavyweight veteran Jeff Monson was busted after he allowed ESPN the Magazine to photograph him spray-painting an anarchy symbol on the Washington state capitol building. Though the charge packed a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, the Snowman was able to plead down to three months. Just days later, Monson was arrested again when a domestic dust-up with one of his many love-interests resulted in an overturned grandfather clock and a fist-shaped hole in the wall; those charges were later dismissed.

According to the story, someone close to the former UFC fighter got wind of ME’s "Free Lee Murray" shirts and offered to facilitate the Q&A, which seems pretty legit.

It looks like "Lightning" might be planning an appeal and hasn’t given up hope that his fate is sealed as he told MiddleEasy that he couldn’t talk about his part in the Securitas heist, which he is purported to have put together.

We won’t steal their well-earned traffic by copy and pasting the interview, but we will post an incredible quote from Murray in which he takes a shot at Tito Ortiz, who Lee is said to have knocked out during a street fight in London.

"…i pass some time by reading some books or mags, watch some DVDs, UFC, movies. I see a great porno of Tito’s wife getting the life fucked out of her by a bunch of dudes. That was pretty fun…not for him i bet …It’s not too bad. Not the first three years four months I done by myself in solitary confinement. I didn’t see no one. It was a fucking hole with rats & shit coming out the hole u piss in It’s not a prob when you piss, it’s a prob when you have to squat over it to take a s***, praying a rat don’t jump out and grab your balls "

I’m no expert on the rules of blackmail or bribes, but if I was going to pay a dude $20,000 to pretend I didn’t kick his ass outside the bar he bounces at, I would…I don’t know…get some kind of a contract or receipt from the victim to make sure he didn’t renege on the deal.

I guess Badr Hari is just a very trusting man who believes in the power of the human spirit.

Here’s the latest on Hari’s legal issues stemming from a smackdown he allegedly laid down on a Dutch bouncer who wouldn’t let him in his club, courtesy of The Telegraaf.

"Hari After his arrest told police that the matter had been settled out of court and that the 33-year-old bouncer had been paid. According to the fighter, the man asked through his lawyer that he be paid [$20,000 USD]. Hari gave him then one third of that sum in order for him to withdraw the allegations, with the promise that the remainder would be paid in full when he did.The door man of the club in Holland refused Hari and his three friends entry into the club and was then beaten and kicked so hard that he broke his jaw and doctors had a plate put in his face to hold it together. After he had received the money, the doorman appeared on the TV channel AT5 to tell him that Hari had assaulted him. The lawyer of the kick boxer, Benedicte Ficq, confirmed in the newspaper that his client has paid money to the doorman, but disagreed that it was hush money."

"If by ‘hush money you mean that the doorman had been paid to lie about the incident, then the answer is absolutely ‘not’. The doorman kept gossiping that Badr had beaten him up for days prior to going to police, which is not true," his lawyer explained. "Hari has had his reputation tainted by some of the things he’s done in his career, so I advised him that he should pay this man to make sure he didn’t create any more problems for him."

Hari can’t bribe a guy properly and he sucks at faking his own death. Maybe he needs to get in touch with Lee Murray and see how his Moroccan homeboy got away with his crime….oh wait.

According to a BBC report, the former UFC fighter who was named as the mastermind behind the 2006 $85 million (USD) Securitas heist in London had 15 years tacked onto his 10 year sentence today following a brief hearing in Rabat, Morocco where he has been held since being arrested in the North African country for importing drugs, whereupon authorities discovered he was wanted in connection to the UK robbery.

Murray fled England with right hand man and fellow MMA fighter, Paul Allen who was sentenced to 18 years in jail two years after being extradited back to London in 2007 when the pair were arrested outside of a mall in Morocco.

"Lightning" managed to avoid extradition because his father was a Moroccan national, but he couldn’t avoid the stiffer jail sentence he was handed down today.